


Expecto...

by Janice_Lester



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: HP: EWE, M/M, Mpreg, Pre-Slash, Snarry-A-Thon Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-29
Updated: 2010-05-29
Packaged: 2017-11-26 16:30:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/652228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Janice_Lester/pseuds/Janice_Lester
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snape gets a visit from the <strike>stork</strike> stag. Harry gets an unwanted house-guest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Expecto...

**Author's Note:**

> My first Snarry! Written for the 2010 Snarry-A-Thon at [](http://snape-potter.livejournal.com/profile)[snape_potter](http://snape-potter.livejournal.com/): _#219 - This is rarely an issue, because not that many people share compatible patronus creatures, but it turns out if your patroni mate, it can lead to some surprising consequences. Harry didn't even know pregnancy was possible for wizards._ Beta'd by the awesome [](http://leela-cat.livejournal.com/profile)[leela_cat](http://leela-cat.livejournal.com/)

When Harry was lonely—which was often these days with so many of his cohort busy with exciting careers, babies, and bought-for-a-song old houses in desperate need of doing up and thoroughly de-cursing—he liked to send his Patronus out into the night with a message for someone he’d been missing. Then he’d wait, and wait.

Sometimes the stag returned, looking mournful as it rapidly dissipated, and Harry knew that the message’s intended recipient could not be found. That’s what happened whenever he sent the stag out in search of his mother, and it’s what happened whenever he sent it to Dumbledore (except the first time, when the stag hadn’t returned but there had been a flash of light as a single scarlet feather appeared in Harry’s living room). Sometimes, of course, the message was received and a friend’s familiar Patronus returned in place of Harry’s stag. Hermione’s otter could be particularly hyperactive, scampering around the place while scolding him about how he was always welcome and should just stick his head in the bloody Floo instead of mucking about with flashy charms like an idiot.

Sometimes, Harry waited for hours, hoping for a response, hoping for no response so that he could continue to hope. Sometimes he sat up late into the night until he began to wonder whether he had somehow only _dreamed_ that he’d sent out his stag to find someone. Sometimes he thought himself a maudlin fool who ought to go down to the pub and scare up some new company if his school friends were all legitimately too busy to cheer him up.

That night, he lay on his bed upstairs in the house he’d bought on Spinner’s end—not the house his mum and aunt grew up in, and not Snape’s either, just another boxy little house on a terrace near the park that made him feel connected to the previous generation. It was an unusually hot, dry spring, so even though dusk had settled it was warm enough for his leg to be on the windowsill, his toes wiggling in the cooler air outside the low, old-fashioned window. It had still been sunny when he sent out his stag. He didn’t really hope for a reply, because this time he’d sent his faithful Patronus to Snape. Just a simple message, one that should be ambiguous enough that Snape could take it badly if he chose: _I wish you were still alive._ Because he did. Of all the senseless deaths Voldemort had rained down on them at the end, Snape’s was the one that, ten years on, still stuck in Harry’s craw. Because Snape hadn’t had to die, Snape had died for a mistake. Snape had died for undone homework.

***

 

Death suited Severus Snape. It meant no teaching, no owls, no taxes, no bloody Harry Potter, and a serious drop in vilification in the press. If it also meant no old friends, no colleagues, and no nodding acquaintances down the Alley, that was a small price to pay for his peace. Besides, the thing about Ireland was that it was full of the Irish, some of the most friendly, open, trusting folk in the world. If he wanted company, all Severus need do was head down to the local, pick a table at random, and offer to buy its occupants the next round, and he’d have friends for the night, no smiling required. If funds were short or he desired respect for something beyond his willingness to shell out for other people’s stout, playing a mournful air on his tin whistle or joining in on a few familiar standards accomplished that. He’d chosen a rural, almost desolate place to spend his death, and the isolation made the people willing enough to be sociable, even with grumpy, eccentric souls who lived in shacks with no plumbing and grew gardens full of stinging nettle and less savoury plants.

Admittedly, he needed to keep his use of magic low-key and largely domestic so as not to attract unwanted attention from London, but that was no great hardship. He could still brew, and when, on occasion, he found himself missing the magical wonder of Hogwarts and the world he’d lived in for decades, he would permit himself the luxury of standing outside—by moonlight, if he could manage it—and conjuring his Patronus to gambol about in the paddock like a glistening, near-substantial soul-mate come to visit, and that was enough.

It was a considerable shock to him when, one night, he emerged from the outhouse to find his silver doe prancing about with an equally gleaming stag. His instinctive reaction was to dash into the house, which had been protected in such a way that the Patronus would not know he was here—provided, of course, that it had not spotted him outside, but if it had it surely would have brought him its message? And it _must_ have a message, must it not? The idiot boy was trying to pin him down, had perhaps begun to suspect that the teacher-shaped corpse in the Shrieking Shack had had, ahem, feet of clay, and also clay knees and a clay torso?

Well, he had no plans to be found so easily. So he sat in the impossible attic of his shabby little Muggle bungalow and watched through the dormer window as the two ethereal ruminants trotted around in the meadow. Then, as he watched, that brash bastard of a stag mounted his sweet, graceful silver doe. For the first time in years, Severus Snape was tempted to come out of retirement—er, _death_ —to hex someone really well in the back of the head.

***

A sudden, inexplicable disgust at certain perfectly ordinary potions ingredients was Severus’s first clue, even before the compulsion to be elsewhere began as a Portkey-like gnawing at the back of his navel. It brought him up short, made his skin go cold and his mind whirl in muddy, worried circles in a way it hadn’t done since he was an adolescent whose mother was suddenly ailing.

The Mark on his forearm had given him plenty of practice resisting magical compulsions of this species, so Severus ignored his body’s insistence on Apparating immediately for England in favour of good, hard, rational research. Which was quickly followed by a good sulk. And then a diagnostic spell it took him actual minutes to persuade himself to perform, because the answer he anticipated was so very… disagreeable.

That the extremely destructive magical ripples resulting from his anger at the confirmation took out most of his own house only fouled his mood further. There was no question of remaining undetected; Ministry drones would already be en route after such a display of magic in a region in which no wizard was supposed to reside. Even if he had enough time to remove all identifying items from the ruins and go on the run—doubtful—the damage was done; there was no question of his ever returning here. Another home was lost to him.

_Potter._ Potter had done this. Always bloody Potter.

A sudden burst of energy filled him, and Severus raced frantically around, plucking absolute essentials from the debris and stuffing them into a charmed pocket. Then he took a second to calm his rapid breathing, turned on the spot, and let the sickening pull in his belly guide him away.

He emerged from the black squeeze of Apparition onto a riverbank, having been shunted off course by substantial magical warding that felt very familiar. He climbed away from the dirty-smelling water, stepped through the wards that allowed foot, wing, and Muggle traffic only, and stalked off down a street so well-known that the nostalgia ached behind his eyes, not entirely pleasant but powerful nonetheless.

***

Harry’s first thought upon opening his front door was that ghosts didn’t usually knock. His second thought was that ghosts, in his experience, really weren’t quite that good at strangling people. His third thought was that Snape still smelled the same, all potion-y and a bit moth-eaten with undertones of angry man. His fourth thought, which, on reflection, should have come a bit earlier, was to whip out his wand and cast a non-verbal Expelliarmus which sent them flying apart towards separate bad landings.

Snape, the bastard, picked himself up smoothly and returned to his very bad impersonation of the imprint of a departed soul (the lack of transparency really did give it away, and the lack of zombie-like grace betrayed his non-Inferius-ness) while Harry was still on all fours on the floor ( _must hoover this week_ , he reminded himself sternly) wheezing and coughing and wondering how air could taste so good. Snape stepped into the house with an expression of disdain and closed the door behind him. He had his wand out, which seemed unlike him, and was twiddling it between his fingers with an air of bored menace. Harry had somehow managed to drop his own wand. Some Auror he was.

“Potter,” he said, and his voice was deeper and hoarser but still brought back a cold rush of memories, “if you cannot maintain control of your pets you shan’t be allowed to keep them.”

Harry coughed unhappily and sat up. “Er, what?”

“As eloquent as ever, I see.”

Ah, yes. You never forgot the way that lip curled.

“Your Patronus, Potter. You’ve been letting it run amuck for months. The arrogant creature has taken to molesting _my_ Patronus. One can always trust a Potter to defile the beautiful things in life. Have you any idea what can happen when two compatible Patronuses mate?”

He stared at Harry, apparently expecting an answer. So Harry wracked his brain, even as he rubbed at his throat, all the while sensing the great black bat’s ire rising gradually past ‘angry’ towards ‘murderous rage’.

“Um, the female one can get pregnant?” he tried, and then braced himself because that’d come out pretty damn flippant.

“Yes, Potter,” Snape said, voice a low and dangerous hiss, “that’s what can happen. That is, in fact, what _has_ happened. What consequences do you suppose that might have for the wizards concerned?”

Harry blinked. “I haven’t the foggiest, Professor.” All right, so slightly embarrassing to slip and call him that after all these years. But not as embarrassing as the nature of the conversation, really, and a bit pointless being embarrassed at all when you were about to be hexed into a slimy thing and pickled for a potion.

Snape smiled grimly. At least, Harry thought it was a smile; it could have been some sort of facial tic, it certainly looked uncomfortable enough. “There cannot be a Patronus, Potter, without an associated witch or wizard to give it animation.” His tone became low and deadly, which was never, ever, a good sign. “Congratulations, Potter, your potency is such that you have managed to impregnate a man who is supposed to be dead at a distance of a hundred and fifty miles. Let the world bow down before this additional proof of your supreme magnificence.”

Harry’s ears were buzzing and the floor seemed to be swishing about under him like a memory of time at sea. Men couldn't get preg—were wizards that different? But surely—only… Perhaps it was a practical joke?

A practical joke enacted by _Snape_ , though? Not bloody likely, was it?

“I—what?” he said stupidly. And then, “I need a drink.”

“That,” said Snape, “may be the first sensible thing you’ve said since 1993.”

Harry wasn’t feeling particularly sensible right then—in fact, he was finding it quite difficult to focus on anything besides trying to figure out what he might have said in 1993 that _Snape_ would consider sensible—but that wand wasn’t pointing his way and there was some of that awful brandy Ron liked in the kitchen so he got up and wandered off in that direction.

Snape followed awfully close. Harry was almost convinced he could literally feel the man’s breath on the back of his neck.

Snape sneered at the brandy, and Harry vaguely recalled that pregnant wo—er, people—weren’t supposed to drink alcohol anyway. So he put the bottle away again and filled the kettle instead, looked around for his wand, found it poking into his back because Snape, of course, could not simply _hand_ a bloke his wand. Harry took it irritably, set the jug boiling, fished about in a cupboard for a not-entirely-disreputable teapot and a decent tin of tea. “Orange Pekoe all right?”

“I will make the potions,” Snape said, crowding Harry away from the bench and towards the tiny kitchen table without actually touching him.

“Since when is tea a potion?”

That sneer seemed to be the Snapeian equivalent of an eye-roll. “Tea is an infusion of plant extracts at an appropriate temperature, to which animal products or acidic fruit may be added in precise quantities according to the preferences of the drinker, and from which medicinal effects may be expected. It is, therefore, a potion, and one which has been brewed and consumed by human beings for at least three thousand years. I will make the tea.” He pointed. “You will sit and explain to me how you plan to raise a child, and just why in all the hells you have chosen to buy real estate in Spinner’s End.”

“Well, I wanted to be somewhere with family history, you know?” Harry sat, sideways, curled his hands over the top of the chair’s ladder back and watched Severus Snape brew tea with the same fierce focus, the same deft movements he’d seen him use to make demonstration potions in class a hundred times back at school. “The good sort, I mean. I got the impression mum liked living in this neighbourhood, though Aunt Petunia once said that it… Hang on! Raising this hypothetical child’s my responsibility? Just mine?”

Snape somehow slammed a mug of black tea down on the table by Harry without spilling a drop. Must be all those years of practice with hot cauldrons. Then he stood there and loomed over him, his own tea—in a cup and on a _saucer_ despite Harry not having been aware that he owned such a thing as a saucer—held demurely at chest height. His fingers were still yellow-stained and spiderlike. “My Patronus was minding her own business, on my own property. Yours was the randy interloper. And I assure you that my pregnancy is far from hypothetical, Mister Potter. You had best be prepared for your upcoming responsibilities.”

He was _enjoying_ this, Harry realised belatedly. Oh, he was raging quietly under the surface, but he was, in a sick, twisted kind of way, also enjoying wrong-footing Harry. So Harry changed the subject. “Care to explain how come you’re still, apparently, alive?”

“Not particularly,” Snape said, and sipped his tea with a faint grimace. He went to peer out the window at the rather badly overgrown back garden.

He was as skinny as ever, didn’t look pregnant at all. Harry frowned and tried hard not to picture Snape with a big round belly sticking out, and swollen ankles, eating gherkins straight from the jar, and complaining about the dangers posed to innocent children by previously harmless household charms and appliances.

“And where you’ve been all these years? Secret Snape mansion somewhere? Valhalla? Purgatory?”

“Indeed,” Snape said. He sipped again. Turned to resume glaring at Harry. “Is the remaining Potter fortune sufficient to provide for our son and heir, or will I be required to curse you with a work ethic?”

“It’s a boy? How do you know it’s a boy? Come to think of it, how do you know that you’re even… Couldn’t you just be imagining—”

Several items of glassware exploded on the dish rack. Snape looked thunderous, and his wand leapt back into his hand from wherever it had been hidden. He advanced one step, then two, until he was towering right over Harry, a snarl twisting his red-tinged face, teacup rattling ominously on its saucer, long, deadly wand at the ready.

Then he appeared to recall that he was speaking to Harry Potter and began to look merely pissed off and condescending. He settled for grumbling something uncomplimentary, then set down his tea and stomped out of the room. Presently Harry heard the distinctive sound of a roaring fire being conjured in the grate, which was followed by the distinctive sound of Severus Snape bellowing “Hogwarts Hospital Wing: Poppy Pomfrey!”

Distantly, Harry heard the sound of yet more glass shattering. The Floo whooshed, and he reached the living room just in time to see Madam Pomfrey throw herself at a surprisingly unresisting Snape and begin shrieking in his ear about how alive he was. Snape tolerated this behaviour for the best part of a minute (though he did mutter something snide about a keen and penetrating medical mind) before extracting himself from the embrace and pushing Pomfrey gently away.

“I require your expertise in getting certain facts past Potter’s considerable defences. Kindly perform a pregnancy-confirmation spell upon my person.” He extended his arms out sideways and managed to look like a statue of a snooty Roman emperor rather than a disgruntled albatross.

Pomfrey stared Harry’s way, eyebrows knitting extra lines into her forehead. He shrugged, waved her back towards his, er, guest. Visitor. Home invader. Whatever. She gave him a look which said that the interrogations had merely been postponed, then produced her wand and began mumbling in Latin at Snape. Who glowed green and then purple and finally a delicate, misty turquoise while a rushing sound filled the room.

“Congratulations, Severus. It’s a boy. You’re about three months along. He looks hardy and active in there.” Her gaze turned on Harry and her words seemed to stretch out and out and out like when Uncle Vernon’s record player had needed a new rubber band inside. “Anything you’d like to tell me, Auror Potter?”

Things went all sort of blurry after that, sounds echoing, time not seeming to run at the usual speed. It was a bit like being back in the lake, desperately searching for Ron. Harry found himself in an armchair, and decided just to sit there until things started making some kind of sense. Although, he had a feeling he might be in for a bit of a wait.

Pregnant. _Snape_.

He tuned back into the conversation when it veered away from the whole Snape-resurrection thing and started to be about him and Snape and… _that_.

“…over-sexed Patronus,” Snape was saying.

Madam Pomfrey clicked her tongue rather loudly, and Harry knew without looking that the two of them were staring at him. And yes, it _was_ apparently possible to make a highly regarded, twenty-eight-year-old Auror who could charm basilisks feel like a naughty schoolboy. His cheeks heated, and he swallowed hard before defiantly raising his head.

“That is most unusual, Severus. Almost unheard of, in fact.”

Snape made a noise that seemed to be a slightly more affectionate version of “Don’t you think I know that, you stupid woman?”

“Have you been getting the required physical contact from the other father?”

Harry jerked ever so slightly at that word. _Father._ He was going to be… He was going to have—

“The compulsion would be difficult to ignore. And yes, I had a most satisfying, though brief, physical contact with Potter upon arrival.”

Okay, so _that_ was enough to snap Harry out of his vague, disassociated state. “I don’t find strangulation all that satisfying, myself, Professor.”

Snape turned those too-dark eyes on him. “You, Potter, already had your satisfaction by proxy at the conception.” His smirk made Harry want to throw things. Big things. Like houses. He supposed he had years of Auror training to thank that he hadn’t inadvertantly blown anything up yet.

Pomfrey took the mention of strangulation seriously and began tutting and muttering over Harry as she scanned him with a peach-scented diagnostic spell. “No harm done,” she announced in due course, after hitting him with a healing charm with enough of a magical kick that it could have been considered harmful in its own right. Harry smiled politely and aimed her at the real patient once more.

“Daily physical contact,” she said firmly. “As much as Severus wants.” She sleeved her wand. “I shall expect to see you regularly, Severus. Once a fortnight, for the next couple of months. More frequently thereafter. I am assuming you wouldn’t rather see someone else?” Her tone said he’d better not prefer someone else. “Edgars at St. Mungo’s is very good. For a man.”

Snape merely shook his head. Pomfrey hmpfhed in satisfaction, gave Harry a look he couldn’t quite interpret which put him in mind of a Muggle drill sergeant, then took herself off back to Hogwarts.

The temperature in the room seemed to drop five degrees.

***

Snape didn’t ask if he could move in. He didn’t even _say_ that he was going to move in. Harry simply went upstairs that evening to find that all of his stuff had been shifted out of the second bedroom he’d been using as a workroom and dumped unceremoniously in the hall. Most of it had been magically shrunken, but Harry was relieved to see that the vintage Shooting Star he’d been painstakingly restoring for the past three months was still its usual size.

It felt very strange to have to knock on his own workroom door. Especially when it stung him for his trouble. Harry sighed, drew his wand, and dismantled the rather half-hearted attack wards.

“Not today, thank you,” came Snape’s cold voice as the door swung open.

So Harry stood there on the threshold and stared into the gloom. Snape had taken over the spare bed and was perched primly on the edge with a book balanced on his knee and reading glasses on his nose.

_Reading glasses. Snape._

“So am I just putting you up for the night, or what?”

“Pregnancy is tiring, Potter. Bugger off and cease exhausting me with your bothersome questions. Don’t you have a whole Quidditch team of little friends you could be pestering?”

Harry rubbed his forehead. The whole mess was giving him a headache. “Look, Snape, there are some things we need to talk about. I was about to put some dinner on. Maybe we could talk while we eat?”

“That is… not entirely objectionable.”

“Chicken marsala suit you?”

Snape cocked his head, as if Harry had just said something preposterous. “Assure me, Potter, that you know how to prepare meat that is fit for human consumption.”

Harry recalled, just once, being accused of not having cooked the meat through properly, Uncle Vernon off chucking up in the loo, Aunt Petunia scolding him in her shrill, horrified way. The fact that no one else had got sick didn’t seem to make any difference to the Dursley jury, and nor did the fact that Vernon had got through most of a bottle of wine (Grunnings had closed a huge and celebration-worthy deal that week, if he remembered correctly) with his dinner. Harry had been on bread and dripping for a week. Hadn’t been able to believe his taste buds when he got out in the real world and tasted a steak that was ever-so-slightly pink in the middle.

“I can cook just fine,” he said stiffly. “Besides, you’re a wizard and a potions genius. I’m sure you can manage some kind of anti-salmonella remedy.”

If Harry stomped his feet on the way back downstairs, he didn’t care. No one here had the right to tell him off for being childish.

***

Snape saved him the trouble of going up to pound on a stinging door once more, and appeared in the kitchen just as Harry was preparing to pour the sauce. He’d shed the robes, Harry noticed, as he gestured him hopefully towards the cutlery drawer. Black trousers and a faded t-shirt that all-but screamed “it’s washing day, all right?” A burnt finger dissuaded Harry from making any further attempts to spot a baby bump while handling hot saucepans. He finished with the sauce, put the pan down, sucked his finger unhappily.

“I am fairly sure your saliva isn’t magical, Potter. A _healing charm_ might prove more effective. I believe they do teach that kind of thing in Auror training even in this day and age.”

Harry showed Snape two fingers. Then he took the advice.

They sat down to chicken marsala with a side of spuds and extra green veg. Snape had already raided the fridge and come up with tropical fruit juice. It was almost a civilised tête-á-tête. Even the sense of simmering hatred beneath the polite mask across the table didn’t really distinguish it from the sort of dinner party Harry occasionally found himself obliged to attend.

It did not escape Harry’s notice that Snape didn't touch a single bite of his food until Harry had swallowed his first mouthful and ostentatiously not died of some hideous poison. Nor did it escape Harry’s notice that—much as he tried to hide it—Snape _liked_ the food.

“So,” Harry said, when the silence began to get on his nerves, “you’re pregnant.”

Snape did not dignify that with a response. Harry shrugged and helped himself to another potato.

“Forgive the bluntness, but why, you know, keep the baby? Surely there are, er, other options?”

Snape stared, black chasm-eyes turned full force on Harry. But his answer when it came wasn’t angry, actually sounded rather thoughtful. “It would please Lily to be a grandmother.” His expression altered subtly, and he looked down so as to stab green beans onto his fork with matter-of-fact violence. “And your dear daddy would be livid at having a Snape in his precious family line.”

Harry didn’t know what to say to that. Hell, he didn't even know what to _feel_ about that.

“You might trouble yourself to explain,” Snape murmured into the silence a couple of minutes later, “what in blazes you thought you were doing sending your Patronus to find me. Why the sudden conviction I was alive?”

Harry shrugged and ate and blushed. “Thought you were dead. Sometimes I send my Patronus to dead people. Long story.”

“I doubt that. ‘Potter is an imbecile, does imbecilic things’. That’s not even a paragraph.”

Harry fought the urge to poke out his tongue, he really did.

 

***

The wretched boy snored. Not consistently, not all night, leading Severus to suspect that he snored only when his tossings and turnings landed him on his back. It wasn’t even a terribly loud snore, he had to admit. But it had been a very long time since Severus had shared a roof with any other person. Even as a teacher, he had been separated by at least a hundred yards and several sturdy stone walls from his fellow sentient creatures (skulking house-elves with feather dusters notwithstanding).

But it wasn’t simply that _someone_ was there. Potter was a sesquipedalian of irritants; in the arena of annoyance he punched far above his weight. He was foolish, ill-informed, poorly dressed, and could not keep his blasted cheerfulness decently under wraps.

He was also more graceful than Severus remembered; he’d filled out a good deal though he remained slight and shorter than average. He did not look like his public image, and Severus was inexplicably relieved. Perhaps he was not so much James Potter’s son after all?

***

Harry clomped downstairs shortly after dawn and stopped dead at the sight of Severus Snape sitting at his kitchen table calmly reading the _Prophet_ and eating a boiled egg.

_Snape. Right. Just what every young man needs in his kitchen._

Still, there was nothing for it. He poured out some cereal, got out the milk, looked for the kettle. Snape made the faintest tutting noise which somehow drew Harry’s attention unerringly to the gently steaming teapot on the table.

“Er, thanks.”

Snape merely raised an eyebrow for a moment before returning to his newspaper.

Harry shrugged and got on with his morning routine, quite successfully ignoring Snape until he was ready to depart. At which point, of course, he had to say something, didn’t he?

“I don’t mean to be rude—”

“Though you will doubtless manage.”

“—but I’m trusting you not to burn the place down while I’m at work. I’m not a little boy and I _do_ know what I can get away with as far as cursing people goes, all right?”

Snape offered a mocking half-bow over his breakfast plate. “As you wish, Lord Potter.” He made that sound like the sort of title that might be awarded to a Yorkshire Terrier who’d never learned the difference between your lawn and your patio for defecation purposes.

Harry smiled sweetly and left.

 

***

“Harry!”

“Harry, mate—”

“Have you seen _The Daily Prophet_? It says that—”

“Harry, Snape’s alive, have you heard? The paper says he—”

“Apparition trail ends somewhere in the midlands—”

“Last seen down your way, mate—”

“Guys, _guys!_ ” Harry yelled, or tried to; it was hard to yell while laughing. But they seemed to get the message about _time and place_. He gave Hermione a pre-emptive hug, kissed the top of her curly head.

One of the lifts conveniently opened its grate, and they stepped aboard. “Your office is closest,” he murmured to Ron, who was batting in irritation at a pink interdepartmental memo which was determinedly pecking at his forehead like an overeager owl, despite being clearly intended for Mysteries rather than Games and Sports.

Ron’s office was quiet, in the sense of sound levels, but loud when it came to the colour scheme. Ginny’s image waved at them from the Hollyhead Harpies poster by the window, and players in the posters of every other team began swooping about trying to attract their attention.

“So what’s the news?” Hermione was, predictably, all in a tither, clearly not having missed the signs that Harry Knew Something.

Harry made sure she sat down before he answered. She was full of babies, after all.

“Snape’s at my house,” he said.

Ron made an inarticulate noise of bafflement. Hermione nodded several times rapidly.

“Before you start, I haven’t asked how he survived, and I don’t think he’d tell me if I did.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask.”

He blinked. “Oh.”

“Why come out of hiding? And why now?” Her gaze scanned him up and down and side to side, as if suspecting him of something she couldn’t yet name.

“What _I’d_ like to know,” began Ron, puffing up slightly, “is why the bloody hell he went to see you, of all people.”

_Yep, still capable of blushing there, Harry, old man._

“That’s complicated. How are we in here, privacy-wise?”

“Safe as houses.”

Harry gave him a look.

“Right. I’ll strengthen the wards, then.”

“It isn’t revenge?” Hermione whispered, when the deed was done and Ron’s wand had clattered down to the desktop to lie between the statuette of Viktor Krum (who was back in Ron’s good graces, having shacked up with a nice Brazilian bloke and become Ron’s opposite number at the Bulgarian Ministry) and the fake Galleon he’d had mounted as a tiny trophy a few years back.

“Not exactly. I guess there’s no easy way to say this. Yesterday I saw Professor Snape for the first time in eleven years, and he told me that he’s having my baby. Madam Pomfrey confirmed it. Well, that he’s pregnant, anyway.”

Ron’s chair groaned—literally—in complaint at how heavily he collapsed into it. Hermione actually appeared to be speechless. For a too-brief while.

“How?” she asked at last. Her hand had gone to the firm swell of her belly.

A crimson-eared Ron nodded furious agreement.

“Apparently, compatible Patronus creatures can mate—but it’s the wizard or witch who conjured the female Patronus who gets preggers. Tell me you _have_ heard of this, Hermione?”

“What?” she said, distracted, stroking her tummy. “Oh, yes. But it’s incredibly rare. Almost—”

“Unheard of. Yeah. Heard that before. Anyway, to sustain the pregnancy the foetus apparently needs magical support from both parents. Which means Snape and I have got to spend some time together.”

“Hang on.” Ron had recovered his voice, though it was a bit croaky. “Snape’s up the duff with your kid—and he wants to keep it? Is he insane?”

“Gee, thanks, Ron.”

“You know what I mean. The man hates you and every one of your paternal ancestors right back to the Norman Conquest. You can’t tell me he wants Potter spawn inside him for nine—”

“Oh, grow up, Ron.”

Ron’s face turned the colour of an oncoming thunderstorm.

Harry’s week went downhill from there.

***

He got home to find the whole street thumping to the bass-line of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black”, which was belting out from Harry’s pathetic (and, obviously, now magically souped-up) stereo. Snape lay stretched out on the sofa, barefoot, in Harry’s too-short dressing gown, head swathed in a pink (not, by any stretch of the imagination, his colour) towel, eating what turned out to be the last nectarine of the half-dozen which had been innocently ripening on the windowsill that morning.

“We’re out of tea!” Snape bellowed into the ringing silence that resulted from Harry unceremoniously Banishing the stereo. He neither looked embarrassed nor lowered his voice a single decibel. “You’ll have to go shopping!”

“Why didn’t you—” Harry began, and then caught the gleam of triumph in Snape’s black eyes and thought better of it. He dumped his backpack, began loosening his outer robe. “I’m having a shower. Don’t run any taps.”

Snape put down the picked-clean stone on the coffee table and paused a moment to suck nectarine juice from a finger. Noisily. “You’ll have to charm the water,” he offered, in a parody of helpfulness. “We’re out of hot.”

_Wonderful._ If ever he’d needed a reminder of just why, exactly, he’d chosen to live alone, here it—

“Oh, and Potter? That was my favourite ‘compact disc’. Bring it back, would you?”

Harry shrugged, trying hard to appear perfectly nonchalant as he Unbanished the Stones. He left the stereo languishing who-knew-where, though.

That evening, Snape insisted on holding his hand for eight minutes, for “medical purposes”. This made it exceedingly difficult to cut his steak. Snape, who had cut _his_ meat into neat bite-sized pieces in advance, did not have this problem. And apparently whatever he’d done to use up all the hot water had not involved washing his hair, which was still as lank and greasy as ever.

_Oh, well,_ Harry thought. _He’s not as bad as Voldemort._

Snape’s hand tightened suddenly on his, fingernails digging in like claws.

Harry fought to remember everything he’d ever learned about Occlumency.

***

The next day, Harry woke to find seventeen pieces of blackened toast in the kitchen sink and all the remaining bread mouldy. There was half a bowl’s worth of cereal left, but the milk he’d bought yesterday had inexplicably gone off overnight. The bathroom smelt strongly of shoe polish, a whole squadron of owls had pooed on the porch, Snape was shut in his room with an overzealous pest-repelling charm on the door, and Harry didn’t find the message from his boss until ten minutes after the time it requested he meet her in Diagon Alley. The note had been tucked into _The Daily Prophet_ sport section, which had been helpfully stuffed onto the mantelpiece beneath the reconstituted remains of a garden gnome Aunt Petunia had sent him for a Christmas present after it had been hit by the first in the small fleet of moving trucks that had finally saved Surrey from the Dursleys who were setting sail for a dreary retirement village in Oxfordshire. Had Harry not been _expecting_ to hear from Daphne that morning, he’d have missed the message entirely and kept her hanging around Gringotts for who knew how long while he reported to the Auror office at the Ministry as per usual.

Harry reminded himself sternly that he’d always wanted a family, and that—pesky efforts to make his life a misery in the short term notwithstanding—Snape was actually helping him with that. A spot of throttling, while therapeutic, would be a mite ungrateful.

***

Harry was just about to get in the bath Thursday evening when Snape announced that he was coming in.

_He does this on purpose,_ Harry thought, _he really picks his moments._

So he sighed and wrapped the nearest towel around his waist. “Just a sec—”

The door opened and in came Snape. The bathroom felt ridiculously small on a good day, but with the two of them in there it bordered on claustrophobic. But, then, Harry had pretty much grown up in a cupboard, so the feeling probably owed more to Snape-related intimidation than to there being slightly less available floor space. Harry finished securing the towel, stood up straight, and offered his hand. Snape took it, relaxed noticeably, and began looking Harry over apparently for something to do.

“My, my, Potter. Do I spy a shaved chest?”

_Don’t give him the satisfaction. Just don’t give him the satisfaction._

“You do,” Harry replied with a forced smile. “Is that a problem?”

“Not at all. These things are easily remedied with potions.”

“Isn’t everything?”

Snape gave a great show of pondering this. “Not Dark Lords,” he said at last. And then ruined it by adding quickly “So you were useful for something after all.”

Harry resisted the urge to make a rude gesture. Mainly because Snape now had hold of both of his wrists, of course. “So why do we have to keep doing this, exactly? I mean, if the, er, conception didn’t require my physical presence, why does this energy transfer thing?”

Snape sneered. “Because conception took place through the magical conduit of our Patronuses, Potter. No conduit but touch is possible here. Touching your Patronus is impossible, so if you were even thinking—”

“I wasn’t.”

Snape peered suspiciously at him, then launched into a lecture on spell theory and the complexities involved in the transmogrification of magical potential that gave Harry a headache and made him very much regret asking.

***

A warm June gave way to a sticky July. Snape went precisely nowhere. Things settled, as much as they could really be expected to. The man was still far from a model house-guest (except when Madam Pomfrey stopped by). Oh, he wasn’t disruptive, exactly. He didn’t break things all the time, or lecture incessantly about what a tosser James Potter had been and how Sirius should have been put down decades ago, or even criticise Harry for his historical failures in potion-making or his more recent contemptible life choices (though he did leave Harry in absolutely no doubt that he detested the Auror Corps in all its staid bureaucracy and was highly suspicious of anyone who’d ever voluntarily associated himself with it). Incidents with loud music, dangerous experimental charms, books strewn just where an unsuspecting, short-sighted person would be most likely to trip over them, and so on, became fewer and farther between. But he always seemed to be there to monopolise Harry’s time when he had other stuff he should be doing, while always becoming remarkably tight-lipped should conversation turn to topics Harry actually wanted to know about. He always seemed to pick Harry’s favourite chair to ensconce himself in, took Harry’s favourite biscuits from the sampler tin, borrowed robes that could not possibly fit and then invariably left them soaking in the tub just when Harry needed them for work. Or needed a bath. And Harry did not dare have a single person ‘round on weekends or after work for fear that Snape would, well, _say_ something.

It got so, one Friday night, he just needed a break from bloody Severus bloody Snape.

“I’m going out. Don’t wait up.”

Snape peered at him over the book he was holding at nose height. Trust Snape to find the only borderline legal Dark Artsy book Harry owned. “Off to see dear Mrs. Granger-Weasley and little Ronald, are you?”

Harry shrugged into his lightest jacket, checked his wand was safely and conveniently stowed and the fifty quid note was tucked in his back pocket. “Actually, I fancy a shag.”

He hadn’t meant to say that, and Snape obviously hadn’t expected to hear it. They blinked at one another for a long moment. Something twisted in Harry’s stomach, a pale reminder of how it had felt to tell Ron that he was never going to fall in love with Ginny.

Then he let himself out, before Snape could mock him further.

The familiar walk towards the riverbank and the end of Snape’s surprisingly durable anti-Apparition wards eased his mind, and by the time he emerged from the crush of Apparition on the outskirts of Greater London, Harry felt light and cheerful and quite prepared to dance.

He found a club, found a boy (fit, baby-faced and so possibly older than Harry’s uncertain guess of 25, and somewhat resembling a male version of a Patil twin, particularly in the shape of his nose and the way he moved), found a private place, found some peace and pleasure. Went home again feeling looser, easier in his own skin. Snape appeared to have turned in early. Harry yawned and headed for his own bed.

Snape woke him in the early hours, agitation seeming to roll off him in tangible waves, and did not speak a word or begin to calm down until Harry sat up and took his hands. Squinting at Snape’s face in the pearly moonlight through the window, he registered fully for the first time that this pregnancy thing was _costing_ Snape. He looked exhausted and old, shoulders hunched as if to shield the visible swell of his belly from whatever pain he was feeling.

“It hurts you, when you don’t get enough touch from me?”

Snape’s left hand twitched. “The infant requires the conduit of touch to pull on your magic. No convenient distance prevents it from drawing upon _mine_.”

_That might have been a response to my question, Professor, but it wasn’t actually an answer._

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes, Harry’, shall I?”

Snape glared.

It was a strange feeling, wanting to comfort Snape. He’d felt a whole raft of things for the man over the years, from murderous rage to pity to regret that he was gone. He’d missed Snape, hated Snape, had the awful sinking revelation that he’d completely misjudged Snape. But simple sympathy was new.

Harry didn’t initiate a hug, but he was surprisingly tempted.

 

***

By August, Snape’s pregnancy was not the sort of thing you’d look at him and miss, and Madam Pomfrey was drowning them with brightly-coloured informative pamphlets about swollen ankles, prenatal nutrition, maternal exercise, spells to be avoided, and (Harry’s personal favourite, because the sight of it had made Snape blush) Meditation for the Pregnant Witch. Snape sent Harry on several apparently urgent runs to Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley for larger trousers. Snape swapped his clomping-about-the-house-just-to-annoy-Harry steel-capped boots for padding-about-silent-as-a-cat-to-give-Harry-nasty-turns-creeping-up-behind-him slippers.

Snape had either figured out how to work the toaster properly or else decided wasting food was less fun than eating it; either way, burnt toast was a thing of the past in Harry’s home. The milk had stopped inexplicably going off, too, but that might be because Snape was so busy drinking it by the litre he didn’t have time to jinx it. Neither of them had done anything about the missing stereo, but Snape _had_ discovered the television and now spent those waking hours he wasn't reading, eating, or causing Harry trouble watching the box. Harry had once heard him muttering about how much better _Eastenders_ would be with a dash of hexing to brighten things up, but Harry had the distinct impression that, hexing or no, the professor never missed an episode. Harry was having to try very hard not to find this oddly endearing.

It was actually one of the soaps running an amnesia story-line, and Snape complaining about this at some length, that reminded Harry about the little vial of precious memories he’d kept safe so long. They were holding hands in the garden while Harry hunted for the stray Horklump he thought he’d spotted lurking somewhere and which would have to go if he didn’t want its presence attracting gnomes who would destroy the veggie patch and generally make a mess, Snape yammering on about idiot Muggles who played even more idiot Muggles on TV and Harry suspiciously examining every mushroom-like object he came across.

“—absolutely no logic in the notion that bonking his wife is going to turn up a man’s memories of _her_ , let alone where he hid the rich uncle’s will. Sex is not an appropriate treatment for a head injury. Why they can’t just take their private doctor’s very expensive advice and permit the memories to percolate through on their own I really don’t—”

“I’ve got a bunch of your memories somewhere about, Snape,” Harry recalled suddenly, treading carefully on the slippery magical moss that carpeted the little wilderness in the back of his garden. “Want them back?”

Snape’s steps faltered for a second. Harry looked up to see him frowning, apparently trying to recall what memories those might be. His expression relaxed for a bit, and then he frowned even harder than before. “Some of them, I admit, it would be agreeable to have back. I retain only monochrome impressions of them, memories of memories. I—” But he seemed abruptly to run out of words.

Harry didn’t push, just resumed his careful search of the undergrowth. Spotted what might be a Horklump and crouched down (which really would have been less awkward had Snape seen fit to release his hand). He gave the mushroom-or-impersonator-thereof a poke with his wand, and it tried to bite him. Definitely not a mushroom.

“Excellent,” Snape said, sounding simultaneously disgusted and intrigued, and letting go of Harry’s hand in a hurry. “Roast that in hot embers and grate what’s left, would you? I shall fix up a Horklump repellant for you, and we’ll need do no more of this tedious skulking about the brambles.”

Harry looked from Snape’s hard, cold-blooded expression to the poor, innocent (but delicious to gnomes) Horklump. “Must I?” The thing was almost _cute_ , in its faux-fungal way, it would be a shame to—

A tiny flash of emerald light rendered the point moot. The creature was dead, they might as well use it for something.

“Okay, Professor. And then I’ll look out those memories for you. Cure your amnesia.”

Snape frowned, but did not argue.

***

Snape was cold and distant, even by Snape standards, for three days after the Horklump incident, which led Harry to believe that he had, indeed, uncorked the little bottle Harry’d brought him and inserted its contents back into his mind.

On the fourth day, Snape went out, for only about the sixth time since he’d moved in (Snape seemed to be a homebody, and Madam Pomfrey came to them). Typically, he returned a couple of hours later with an armful of books. This time, however, he was gone much longer, and Harry, who was in the loo when Snape finally did return, didn’t even get to catch a glimpse of him before he was shut up in his room behind a door that now bore the skull-and-crossbones design of old-fashioned poison bottles, just in case Harry was in any doubt over the state of his welcome in there.

The next morning, Snape appeared while Harry was brewing coffee (a “potion” Harry was trusted to produce on his own, though whether this was because Snape considered coffee so fundamentally robust it was impossible to screw up or so vile that it couldn’t possibly be made worse Harry didn’t know) and threw a length of wood at him.

“Catch,” he said, after Harry had caught it, awkwardly, left-handed.

Harry pulled a face designed to express his deepest gratitude for such a well-timed warning. Then he looked at what he was holding.

It was a broom. Dented, damaged, almost twigless, but a broom. The meagre vibration beneath his fingers told him it was in desperate need of some charm strengthening or perhaps outright replacement, and it obviously needed new twigs, a sand and varnish, and reapplication of the gold-leaf on the maker’s mark. But it was definitely a broom, solid, well-balanced, and probably ash-handled, and, unless he missed his guess, had once upon a time not been cheap. In its current condition it was worthless, but they both knew Harry could do it up beautifully and would enjoy doing so.

“It’s a Moontrimmer,” Snape said. “Antique. Belonged to my mother before me, and someone else in the family before her.”

Harry looked from Snape to broom to Snape again. And decided that this was a figurative olive branch, whatever the actual wood might be. “Thanks,” he said softly.

Snape sneered. “Be very sure of your repair skills before you attempt to ride it. I shan’t be held responsible should the famous slayer of demons break his famously scrawny neck riding my old broomstick.”

Harry couldn’t help the grin. When Snape’s insults lacked any real bite, that meant something. “Thanks,” he said again, forgetting all about coffee and moving to the table so he could sit and examine the broom more closely. “Did you play Quidditch?”

Snape’s tongue clicked loudly in the small kitchen. “That, of course, being the only _possible_ reason a wizard might own a broom.”

Harry shrugged. “Just wondered. Thought maybe you played Seeker against my dad.”

Snape snorted. “The Seeker is only peripherally involved in the game. The Keeper, however, must retain an overview of the game, watch many things happening at once, and accurately judge the psychology of the opposing Chasers in order to predict which hoops they might attack. The Keeper has a direct impact on the score throughout the game, rather than merely having the power to end it. And your much-lauded father was a _Chaser_ , Potter. And not an especially good one.”

He stalked off in a swish of extra voluminous black pregnancy robes, apparently content to have the last word.

Harry sat there at the table, stroking the ancient broom and smiling to himself.

***

 

Snape got more touchy-feely as autumn struck. Harry forcefully reminded himself what Madam Pomfrey had said about “Daily physical contact, as much as Severus wants.”

“It seems I require more blasted contact,” Snape said. His hand slipped from Harry’s nape, but he didn’t step back. Harry shrugged and went on forking grooves into the edges of his bacon-and-egg pie pastry. And only jumped slightly when Snape yanked up his t-shirt and pressed warm, bare flesh against his back. Then there were arms across his stomach, keeping him planted right where he was. It made Harry feel strange, tingly, to have that very pregnant belly pressed against him, to know that there were actually three of them in this little room.

“I want peas,” Snape said, digging his chin into Harry’s shoulder. “There had better be peas.” He sounded spectacularly petulant.

“Having cravings, are we?”

Snape snorted in his ear and continued to cling to Harry like a limpet, even when it was time to bung the pie in the oven and get on with the destruction of biscuits for cheesecake base. Harry endeavoured to avoid hitting Snape with the rolling pin during this process, for which consideration he received no thanks whatever.

Snape ate a ludicrous quantity of peas at dinner, and then turned his nose up at the cheesecake.

By mid-September they’d progressed to awkward embraces during which Harry could actually feel something—magic, energy, whatever—leaving him for the baby. It made him grumpy and irritable and tired, and he began to wonder at Snape’s having seemed so—well, perhaps _normal_ wasn’t quite the word… But he’d have thought that an extra-grumpy Snape would be positively lethal.

The first time Harry felt the baby kick beneath his hand it nearly sent him flying. It was as if a huge build-up of static electricity had taken the opportunity to discharge gleefully through him.

Snape actually laughed. It wasn’t a kind or pleasant laugh, but it was, most definitely, a laugh.

Harry grinned like a loon for at least an hour. Snape really, truly, had a baby in there. And had laughed. He tried to explain it later to Hermione.

“Calm down and try to think clearly, Harry. You aren’t making any sense.”

But Ron had looked up from his _Quidditch Quarterly_ (subscription paid for by his department, much to Ron’s delight), and his expression had told Harry that he understood perfectly.

 

***

In late October, _The Daily Prophet_ finally got wind of the Snape pregnancy. Someone’s family snapshot taken in Hogsmeade had caught Snape, striding through the near background, distinctly in focus and definitely pregnant. It had taken a while for anyone to think anything of it, however. So Snape lay on the couch at Hallowe’en, seven months pregnant—so pregnant that he now relied on balancing charms to avoid falls when walking and ranted at length about the insufficient lumbar curve of the male human spine any time Harry got near the subject (these rants were sometimes spiced up with offers to bend Harry’s spine for him in new and fascinating ways)—using his belly for a table to support a bag of jelly babies while he perused the paper through those strangely appealing reading specs.

He seemed to find the photo amusing, in his curmudgeonly way. Harry, who’d read the front section earlier while Snape was still gloating over the obituaries, was thinking of having it framed, because there it was, proof that Snape was full of baby—Harry’s baby. Plus, the bloke had an antique broom handle over one shoulder.

“Here,” Snape said, thrusting the remainder of the sweets at him so he could begin the laborious process of getting to his feet. “I detest the black ones.”

Harry kept his smirk under wraps until Snape had made his ponderous way safely out of the room. Because Harry was the one with an acknowledged preference for one particular kind; Snape was colour-blind when it came to jelly babies.

***

Snape’s appraisal made Harry extremely conscious of the tightness of his metallic-flecked jeans, and the numerous artistic slashes in his singlet. The fact that he’d resorted to hair gel—not particularly successful at flattening down his hair, of course, but it _did_ at least make it look as if the effect was intentional—did not appear to have escaped Snape’s notice either.

“All you need is a handkerchief in your back pocket and you’ll have legions of queer Muggles trailing you everywhere you go.”

Harry smiled blithely. “That’s the idea.” He slipped his coat off the hook, tucked it over his arm. “Well, not the legions, but it _is_ nice to have a choice, don’t you think?”

Snape opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. It was actually rather comical. Then he turned and swept from the room.

Harry sniggered to himself as he stepped out into the night.

 

***

It’d been a good night, Harry mused, assembling a bacon and cheese sandwich at three o’clock on a Saturday morning. He’d enjoyed getting a bit of social time with Ron and Hermione, probably their last for a while with Hermione’s due date almost on them. After those two had gone home, arguing all the way out of the Leaky over whether or not Ron should be allowed to assume responsibility for carrying her handbag, Harry had wished the over-worked (but beaming) Hannah a good evening and gone looking for some more private entertainment. Which meant Muggle London and men who didn’t know Harry’s name just from glancing at his forehead.

It was only now, after almost ten years as a fully-fledged Auror, that Harry truly appreciated just how useful—and uncommon—a thing it was for a wizard to be able to navigate Muggle spaces, Muggle culture, without raising eyebrows. So many of his fellows, even those who had at least one Muggle parent, had assimilated so well into the world of Hogwarts and wider wizarding society that they were no longer entirely comfortable or fluent in Muggle circles. These days, Dean Thomas had to concentrate to avoid whipping out his wand to deal with a pigeon’s donation in Leicester Square. Hermione frowned a lot whenever she spoke to Muggle friends and relatives about science or history or art, lest she accidentally let slip a bit of magical theory or wizarding law or “alternative” history. But Harry just seemed to be able to switch. Ten years’ Muggle training in not making a scene, not standing out, not being noticed, had served him well. It would never make him grateful for his upbringing, but he couldn’t deny the skills were useful sometimes.

He’d had a little too much to drink, to judge from the direction of his thoughts as he dumped the frying pan in the sink for later attention. Still, the sex had been good—Richard? Raymond? Reg?—so he can’t have been that far gone.

A small sound behind him made Harry jump.

“Off drinking and drabbing again tonight, Potter?”

He turned, making his face go blandly cheerful so Snape wouldn’t know how badly he’d startled him. “Drabbing, Professor? I don’t even know what that is.”

Snape was standing really rather close. “Don’t you? Why am I not surprised?”

Okay, so _that_ had definitely been an insult. He frowned. “It’s late. I just want a bit of a snack before bed. What do _you_ want?”

Snape, apparently, wanted to shove Harry back against the kitchen counter and kiss him senseless. There were lips, and tongue, and a warm body pressed against his, and Snape made tiny noises of eager approval into Harry’s mouth. And Harry, who had been feeling pretty well-satisfied and mellow a minute ago, was finding this surprisingly arousing.

Just as abruptly as it had started, it was over. Snape pulled back. Harry straightened his glasses and resisted the bizarre urge to grab the bloke by the front of his ugly grey night-shirt and haul him in for another go.

“What,” said Harry stupidly, “the hell?”

“Hormones,” Snape replied, smirking. He picked imaginary lint off one sleeve. “Besides, if one is magically compelled to touch you, Potter, one might as well enjoy the experience.”

Just hormones? Harry was not entirely sure he believed him. Or that he _wanted_ to believe him. Absently, he traced a fingertip across his lower lip, as if he could touch Snape’s kiss.

_Bloody hell,_ he thought, watching Snape slink away towards the stairs once more, _look what he’s done to my life. And all I did was conjure a bloody Patronus!_

But then Snape turned, and Harry saw him in profile, shoulders back, tummy heavy with child. He wanted that child, they both did. Perhaps more than mere magical happenstance had been at work the night their unusually alike Patronuses met?

“Good night,” Snape said, and then, after the briefest of pauses, “Harry.”

And all of a sudden, Harry felt very sober and very, very… grounded. No, that wasn’t quite it. He felt as if, at last, he had roots.

“Good night, Severus.”

“I shall let you know,” Snape said, waspish and turning away again, “when you may call me that.”

Harry grinned. One hundred percent reliable, that was Snape. Their son was going to have an interesting childhood.

 

 

 

***END***


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